Open and Close
by Petronia
Summary: Ever wondered about those Schwarz meetings where they appear to be floating in outer space? This is one explanation. Douglas Adams meets gratuitous videogame crossovers (specifically, Reno out of FF7) meets weirdness meets booze.
1. Chapter 1

**Open/Close – Chapter 1**

They pinned it all on Schuldich, afterward. For opening the door, but mostly for having brought in the recliner in the first place. After all (Nagi would snarl intermittently for the duration of their travails), if the bastard wanted to recline he could have found himself a plastic folding chair, something that weighed a couple of pounds and for which grudging self-adjustment could have been made. Or – _always hypothetically speaking of course_ – he could have asked Nagi, who would have calibrated the Hyperspace Lab at the outset, thus saving – not frantic worry, but several hours of Nagi's time that he was never going to get back. But no: Schuldich had to go his own way, and he had to overdo things. As always. How had Nagi racked up the bad karma of his continued company?

And on and on. Not that Schuldich cared. Guilty as charged was not only his middle name, it was his first and his last, and he'd had a lifetime to grow into it. If karma were the point at hand-

But it wasn't. The Lab was the point at hand.

To describe the Lab...

They'd gotten it from Headquarters, on a technology inventory request. They'd been travelling a lot during those few months, from Himalayan valleys to Oceanic atolls, and Nagi needed a way to keep his files and equipment close to hand. That was the way he'd worded it. What he'd been _looking_ for was a souped-up laptop case, which showed how little they'd known about the Organization's resources even then. (Not to mention how alien the Elders' thought processes were when they weren't paying attention.) Nagi asked for portability, so they gave him better.

The physical aspect of the thing was a hardcover-novel-sized box sheathed in featureless black plastic, running on a 9V battery that didn't seem to need much changing. There was a port for Nagi's laptop, but most of the time it lay unattached, somewhere convenient and unobtrusive. The coffee table of the Tokyo condominium; an upstairs corner of the Munich townhouse. There was a switch. Flip the switch—

It was like projecting a slide of a photograph of a door. A regular house door, molded wood painted white swinging on metal hinges. Except there was no beam of light, and if someone stepped in front of the box the image on the wall remained. And the brushed chrome of the knob was solid enough.

The Lab was on the other side.

It presented as a corridor, three point two meters by two point five meters, extending lengthwise into something Crawford said was expressible only with asymptotic notation. As far as Schuldich was concerned, that meant trying to find the other end was a waste of time. The walls felt like glass to the naked touch, the floor – improbably – like vinyl tile, and there were fluorescent lights in the ceiling that flickered on when the door opened and stayed on until they'd left. Nagi had piled his machines a few feet away from the door, around the single electric outlet in the wall (Crawford didn't try to explain that one), and they never ventured far beyond that point. The furniture, after all, was the only crutch visual perspective had to lean on, and to kick the legs out from under the latter would have been... altogether disorienting.

Just staring hard at the walls could do it. There were _stars_ behind that glass. Pinpricks of light, unwavering due to the lack of surrounding atmosphere (but where _were_ they?), scattered spendthrift across the field of vision like seed diamonds. Others too: billowing red giants, the aching non-light of a neutron star. Watch too long and one became convinced that the Lab was moving, skimming from one fragmentary elliptic path to another at impossible speeds, dancer-like, its brief orbits sketched around partners that trailed planets like baubles, coyly veiled in nebulae, asteroid belt half undone and inviting...

The dazzling scintillation of a passing comet...

A view, in other words, for which the human eye was sorely under-equipped.

Endless galactic vistas, 1; depth perception, 0.

Nagi didn't like it much. Nagi had a 22" screen that eliminated nearly all peripheral vision, meaning that as long as he was working he didn't have to care. Farfarello went thoughtful faced with the harmony of the spheres, which was why the Lab ended up subbing as their briefing room. Schuldich rather thought that Crawford had taken other considerations into account, perhaps regarding the inherent difficulty of bugging a wormhole in the space-time continuum. (But would said task be impossible for the Organization itself?) He didn't know for sure. He rarely knew for sure with Crawford. That bothered him, but not always.

He _liked_ the Lab.

It was quiet, for one. Every room in every building in the world bore a unique ambient noise signature, barely perceptible to the common ear but often a controlled roar in Schuldich's; the Lab made no sound at all. Not even the fluorescent lights hummed. It was how he _knew_ the place was a wormhole. When Schuldich was alone in the Lab it was like the sorry shoddy universe had been wrapped in cotton wool, and for a short time it felt like bliss. A short time. Not too long, or boredom set in.

At some point he started using it to take five-minute cigarette breaks. Minor defiance of the rules: he wasn't supposed to smoke in the common rooms of the flat, let alone the Lab. (How did it ventilate? Was the air perhaps – _asymptotic?_) Of course, Schuldich was never one to take much heed of minor regulations, but as the weeks passed he noticed something interesting.

To wit: Crawford never found him out.

It was his first intimation that the place was not as... well, they'd never thought of it as simple. Not per se. But it wasn't as _consistent_ as they'd assumed.

Five minutes in the Lab, Schuldich eventually determined, did not necessarily equate five minutes out of the Lab. Sometimes it equated up to half an hour, during which – according to Farfarello, never stingy with mental eyewitness accounts – Crawford might actually have poked his head around the door to see if Schuldich was there. Apparently he never was. Apparently the inside never so much as smelt of smoke. Schuldich would flick his butts toward the far end of the corridor, and they'd disappear. Once (it should have alerted him to the dangers, but how could he have guessed?) he'd opened the door and stepped out of the hall closet. He'd been in time to see Crawford emerge from the Lab, looking a _tiny_ bit flustered at coming face to face with the object of his search in the corridor he'd just turned his back on. It wasn't much, but coming from a precognitive it made Schuldich's day.

The obvious working hypothesis was that the Lab liked _him._ This did not strike Schuldich as particularly odd. Everyone liked him. It was the smile or something. He was forever having to demonstrate to various bodies the error of their ways.

He waxed confident; overly so. The recliner was pure arrogance.

* * *

_Deep red the roses and raptures of vice that number seventy-seven and then they would haunt me in Heaven which has one thing in common too it's-a-it's-a-it's-a sin tonight is the night all right how sweet are the voices of the children of the dark just like Sana-chan live special from Tokyo Tower..._

"Shut _up! Gott in Himmel,_ will you just shut the fuck up?"

There was a pause – a literal one. Schuldich's mindscape virtually rang with silence. It was another few seconds before he heard the bolts being drawn back; he shifted his weight from foot to foot and glared. The bolts were new, and at some point they would have to be removed for safety's sake, but so far no one had bothered to initiate the (possibly bloody) confrontation. The semiotics of the situation annoyed Schuldich. Three decently functional sociopaths to one homicidal paranoid schizophrenic, and guess whose bedroom door was locked from the inside?

The door was jerked back on its chain. Farfarello's good eye appeared in the gap, blinking goldenly. "What?" he intoned.

"Shut up," Schuldich repeated. (He could hear a muted advertisement jingle coming from somewhere in the room – _amakute suppakute kuchi no naka ni shuwashuwa shite_ – since when had Farfarello owned a radio?) "Chill it. Keep it down. Why the fuck do you have to broadcast like that?"

"I have no idea what you mean," said Farfarello. The visible half of his face looked bored. Schuldich gritted his teeth.

"Yeah, and fuck you too. Listen, I drew guard duty last night, and tonight we're staking out that fucking warehouse in Kanegawa. I need a nap, okay? Is that too much to ask?"

"And in what manner is this my problem?" (_And now it's back to the studio with Haru-kun,_ chirped the radio, _and here as our special guest today we have the immensely popular child star, Kurata Sana—_)

"I can't _sleep_ when you're gibbering like that, you psycho!" Schuldich threw out his arms in exasperation. "Take your pills, you freak, why don't you ever take your pills? Do you _want_ to be strung up in a straitjacket and pumped full of drugs?" It would happen too, if Schuldich gave the word, because Farfarello invariably signaled his episodes by getting loud. Schuldich thought he was being damnably sensitive in not holding that over Farfarello's head.

"Keep vigil, then, Beelzebub," said Farfarello. The mental noise was rising again like a groundswell, belying his level exterior: mangled Milton, snippets of talk radio. "Ruminate on your sins, for they are legion. And stay out of my hair. Some of us have plans for the day."

Schuldich opened his mouth, and Farfarello closed the door in his face. The next second the bolts slammed home.

There was a silence – physically, at least.

"Beelzebub," said Schuldich finally, to the air. "I like that." He kicked the door with abrupt viciousness, to no perceivable effect, and stalked away. Once back in the living room he stood for a moment with arms akimbo, glaring at the glass of the balcony door while he considered his options.

Then he turned and made a beeline for Crawford's study.

"Well, two can play at that game—"

When Crawford returned to the flat three hours later, Nagi was in his room and Farfarello was seated cross-legged on the floor of the den, his attention entirely occupied by Playstation and flickering screen. There was no sign of Schuldich.

There was, however, an empty space in Crawford's study where his chair had been.

* * *

_— Montreal, January 2003_


	2. Chapter 2

**Open/Close – Chapter 2**

Rude was late. And Reno was bloody _starved._

He checked his watch for the third time and sighed. _Seven. Seven post-fucking-meridian on a Friday fucking evening, and why am I still here?_ It was starting to feel as if he'd never escape the Building's clutches. A pity, that, having made it as far as the locker room and all.

He kicked the door of his locker desultorily closed, and wandered out into the deserted gym, skirting the haphazardly scattered exercise mats. Eyed the vending machine in the corner warily. Tempting, but... Maybe an energy drink. Reno hated the taste of the damn things as a general rule, but there was no real way they could worsen after their sell-by date.

He fished out his wallet.

It proved to contain, in no particular order: his Shinra ID, two expired Building keycards, three pieces of fake ID (two official and one not), a handful of crumpled receipts with telephone numbers scribbled on the back, the spring-key to a Midgar Train Station locker Reno had once used for a cash drop-off of a dubious nature, seven cards of credit, debit and various disused loyalty discounts—

And one five-gil coin.

"Ah, hell—"

A brief rummage through trouser pockets produced several more fivers. The last was recalcitrant, and Reno nearly despaired until he thought of taking off his jacket and shaking out the lining. Sure enough, that produced the last few gil. He deposited the coins triumphantly, and pressed the selection button.

The light next to the image lit up, and there was a subdued clunk deep in the bowels of the machine. Then—

Nothing.

Reno waited. _Fuck,_ he thought, with a grey sense of pleading.

His drink persisted in its refusal to appear.

He pressed the button again, then thumped the machine's side. Still nothing.

_Goddamned shitty—_

He thumped the machine again, from the front this time – then tried to stick his hand up the slot, where it promptly got caught. He had to tug hard before his fingers would come free, scraping them against the trap door with the clumsiness of sudden panic. Reno nursed his hand and gave the machine a vicious kick. "Stupid piece-a-no-good-shit—"

The front of the vending machine flew open, and someone slammed into him like a ninja stealth drop gone sideways.

"Oof!"

Reno fell over backward. Reflex took over in the split second before the back of his head hit the ground, and he twisted, flipping his counter-assailant over so that they both landed heavily in a heap. There was a yowl of surprised protest, words indistinguishable, and they rolled wildly. Reno came up on top and pinned the other man with brutal efficiency, body-weight on the legs, arms twisted back and held in a death-grip. Panted with the sudden adrenalin and sat up, staring down at the other man. _Sunnuva bitch. Avalanche?_

Red hair in his field of vision, a brighter shade than his own.

The other man coughed into the exercise mats, and spat out a stray bit of Reno's ponytail that was trailing down into his face. Turned his head to stare up at Reno with blue-green eyes; no less arresting for being natural and not mako-taint. He looked half-amused and half-_be_mused, as if the last few seconds had happened too fast to piss him off properly.

"Gesundheit," he said. "Who the fuck are you, cowboy?"

* * *

The next thought Schuldich had was this: _what, Turk as in from Turkey?_

And then he lost it, because the other man wrenched his elbows upward in a professional manner that boded ill. "I'm asking the fucking questions," he said. "And you're gonna be answering them for a while. What the fuck are you doing in here?"

"I'm not quite sure," Schuldich said. That earned him another wrench. "Look, could you let me up and we could talk about – ow. Okay." Obviously not an option, except his subduer was thinking about the cellphone in his jacket, and from his current vantage point he needed both hands to keep Schuldich pinned. Armed reinforcements would suck just as bad, even if he had no idea who'd be doing the reinforcing.

Yet another day in his so-called life. At least he'd gotten his nap in.

Something hard bumped against the small of his back. "Know what this is?" the voice said. Schuldich stared at the exercise mat in front of his nose and quashed the inevitable upsurge of flippancy.

"A gun?" he ventured. It didn't feel like one. "A... nightstick?"

"An electrified nightstick. So now you're going to put your hands up where I can see them, and _keep_ them up—" a sharp prod— "and you're going to get up very very slowly. Comprende?"

Schuldich sighed. Once he was standing he turned around carefully, hands lifted, letting the tip of the nightstick slide round over his ribs. Truth be told the sensation was vaguely arousing, but all of Schuldich's sexual responses were untimely at best, so he paid it no mind.

He wasn't in the flat, of course, or the building. He was in what looked like some multinational's corporate gym from hell. And he couldn't hear the others.

So either someone moved the box with him inside – and he wasn't sure that could be done – or else...

The other man had picked up his jacket and was in the process of one-handedly retrieving his phone. "Hey," Schuldich said loudly, more to get him to look up than anything else. "Hey, where the hell are we?"_ Listen to me. Don't touch that keypad._

The other man's eyes narrowed, but his hand paused in the action of flipping the phone open. "What the fuck are you, stupid?"

"Lost, actually." Still no hand movement. This was going to be a tricky one. The other man was _trained_ to be on his guard, plus he was smart and itching to call for back-up and Schuldich's story was incredibly stupid, albeit true. What was he supposed to say – that he made a mistake, went through a door that didn't lead where he thought it would lead?

At least they were making eye contact; half the battle won, there.

"This is some kind of mistake," he said. "I, ah, I went through this door, and it. Uh." The other man – _Reno, that's the name_ – just stared at him, and Schuldich cursed mentally. _You don't want to arrest me, Reno. Really, you don't. You are fascinated and wish to know me better, or something._ "Look, there's this fucking weird contraption we're using for work, like a room-in-a-box. I just walked out of it. I don't understand how it works, to tell the truth I thought this was going to be the fucking living room of my fucking flat – where is this? By the way?" _Answer me, c'mon, you know you want to..._

"We're on the sixty-fourth floor of the Shinra Building," Reno said after a pause. Schuldich was going cross-eyed with the strain of combating the other man's ingrained paranoia; it was just as well he didn't seem to have any feel for mental interference. Most people didn't, of course, but some were trained and a few just came prickly. "You're fucked, you have to have managerial security clearance to get in here. What was it, exit materia?"

"Um, yeah, that." _Keep talking. You have no calls to make. You have absolutely no one to arrest. I am as innocent as a dormouse and safe as, uh, dormouse houses._ "Exit thingymajig, which I just... I'm sorry. _What_ building?"

"The _Shinra_ Building." Reno waved his hand vaguely, appeared to notice the nightstick in it for the first time, blinked and stuck it back in his belt. "No, you're kidding me, right? It's, like, a little hard to miss, being in the fucking center of Midgar and all that."

"Midgar?"

"Yeah, _Midgar._"

"Uh... are we still in Tokyo?"

"Where the fuck is Tokyo?" Reno said, voice now completely candid. It was Schuldich's turn to stare.

"Okay," he said. "Okay... no. Not okay. Fuck no. You know what? Help me open this thing up again. I'm going home."

He turned, dropping his hands and abandoning eye contact. The door of the vending machine swung freely on its hinges, revealing metal racks full of energy drinks and ersatz-looking packaged snacks. There was no space Schuldich could have exited from, or for that matter hidden. He eyeballed it for a while.

"That's not the way exit materia works," Reno said. He'd come up and was peering over Schuldich's shoulder with the air of a mildly interested kibitzer. Schuldich resolved not to say anything that might snap him out of it. It hadn't taken all the way: a downgrade from _dangerous intruder, Shinra, general_ to _friendly intruder, Reno, personal_ was minute as subconscious readjustments went, not that he was complaining. Some of them went blank and expected him to give all the orders. "You set it, it moves you one way. You'd have to point it the other way and re-cast if you want to get back."

"No," said Schuldich. "Mine was two-way. It was just this box. Made a door appear."

"Yeah, okay," Reno agreed blandly. "Where's this mystery box then? You still got it in your pocket?"

"No, I—"

There was a distinctive _ting_ from the elevators on the far side of the floor. They both stilled for a moment, then Reno put one hand on Schuldich's shoulder and propelled him decisively toward the bathroom.

"Rude and Elena," he said.

"Who?" _The reinforcements, I bet. _

"They were supposed to meet me here. Don't worry about it." The door swung closed behind them just in time to cut off the whisper sound of elevator doors opening. The bathroom was the typical off-white corporate employee model, slightly dingy and smelling of nerve-numbing lemon cleaning spray over a base note of backed-up sewage drain. Schuldich glanced about at the tiles with disapproval.

"God, it stinks in here."

"Shut up," said Reno, gesturing to one stall. "Give me a hand—"

A minute or so later Rude pushed through the door. He swung the stall doors inward experimentally, shrugged, adjusted his tie in passing in front of the sink mirror and exited the bathroom. Elena was leaning against the wall, yawning discreetly. She looked at him. He looked at her and scratched the back of his head.

"Well, never mind," she said. "He's probably down at the bar already."

* * *

The edge of Nagi's bedroom door banged against the rubber doorstop, hard. "Where the hell is Schuldich?" said Crawford's voice.

"Please to clarify semantic frame of query," said Nagi. He did not turn around. "'Where' as in general availability and presence – or lack thereof – or 'where' as in actual, precise location on a macro-physical scale?"

"What?"

"The answer to the first question is, he's not around. The answer to the second doesn't compute. The metaphysics would make for an interesting discussion, though."

Crawford stepped up behind Nagi's chair. The Hyperspace Lab projector was jacked into Nagi's laptop, which was jacked into an ethernet wall socket. Windows of complex, ever-changing graphical models crowded the laptop screen, and that of Nagi's personal workstation. Text data streamed unobstrusively underneath, green and white on black, quick enough that the lines flickered and blurred.

"What's this?" he asked.

Nagi leant back in his chair, massaging the inside of his forearm. "One aforementioned individual was a stupid shit," he said. "Remember when I told you the configuration profile of this _thing_ differentiated between animate and inanimate? That I'd set it to recognise only the four of us, but I'd have to recalibrate to bring in more than thirty-five pounds of inert mass at once?"

Crawford nodded. Nagi reached out and tapped at a flat-topped peak on one of the three-dimensional displays.

"That's fifty pounds worth of interior decorating right there. Something like an extra-"

"Recliner," said Crawford. "Something like the recliner currently missing from my office." And then, "Goddamned _idiot._ Is he in there?"

"In a manner of speaking..." Nagi looked up at him. "Your office recliner? Really?"

"Schuldich likes it," Crawford said absently. (Nagi's mind provided him with a belated image: Schuldich happily sprawled and napping on the aforementioned piece of furniture like an oversized marmalade tomcat. He'd always suspected, however, that Schuldich liked the recliner not for itself but because it was in Crawford's office; the way cats will invariably hop into the lap of the one allergic person in the room.) "Farfarello's in one of his moods, he probably wanted the quiet. _What_ manner of speaking?"

Nagi sighed. "Look, this – _place,_ all right, this _place_ isn't in the box. It doesn't even answer to the box, apart from visual templating. What answers to the box is the _door._ I've set rules for what goes in and out the door, and as long as those rules are followed the door opens between _here_ and _there._ Break the rules, though, and the whole thing goes pear-shaped, see? I open the door _here_ and it throws an error, system destabilises, the lot. And if someone opens the door _there—_"

He threw up his hands.

There was a pause. Then Crawford said with exaggerated calm, "Just tell me, is he in there or not? In a word."

Nagi hesitated. "No," he said finally. "He left the system more than an hour ago, and until he opens the door and walks back in again there's really fuck-all I can do to get him back."

Crawford, uncharacteristically this time, said nothing. Nagi glanced up again and saw that he was gazing intently at one of the renders: a jagged, slow-blooming fractal flower. The bottom half of his face seemed clenched. Nagi wondered if he was seeing something in the future instead, and whether it was unpleasant.

_Surely nothing unpleasant,_ he thought. He'd always had the intuition that the Lab liked Schuldich. He wouldn't have been surprised if Schuldich could talk to it. Surely nothing would happen.

"So—" he ventured when the silence began to verge on the oppressive. Crawford straightened, expression reverting to the annoyed preoccupation Nagi pegged as his default mode.

"So we wait," he said.

* * *

"Jesus," Schuldich said after a couple of minutes. "Did you fix this thing on purpose? Don't push, I'm going to land in the fucking bowl."

He balanced himself gingerly on the ceramic cover of the toilet tank, and hopped down. Reno followed a moment later, pausing to replace the loose grid of the ventilation shaft. He brushed at the sleeves of his suit and grinned.

"No," he said, "just a question of knowing your territory. You know all the hiding places, they won't be able to hide from you. Right?"

"Point taken," said Schuldich, who never had trouble pinpointing intruders. "Sorry about that. Friends of yours?"

"Yeah... Well, colleagues, actually. Team members."

"Yeah?" Schuldich didn't ask what they did; he was, he thought, beginning to relate.

"Listen," Reno said, "I've been thinking. Maybe I could hook you up."

* * *

_— Montreal, September 2003_


End file.
